Chantal Tribolo

• PhD
• Researcher at Université Bordeaux Montaigne

The south Levantine mid-Middle Palaeolithic (mid-MP; ~130–80 thousand years ago (ka)) is remarkable for its exceptional evidence of human morphological variability, with contemporaneous fossils of Homo sapiens and Neanderthal-like hominins. Yet, it remains unclear whether these hominins adhered to discrete behavioural sets or whether regional-scale...

Rose Cottage Cave is widely recognised as a key sequence for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in the southern African central interior, with its unique palaeoenvironmental and chrono-cultural archive spanning a semi-continuous record from the Late Pleistocene to the 19th century. Building on important previous research, new excavations will...

Despite new impetus for Late Pleistocene research in West Africa, little is known about the range of Middle Stone Age behaviours in this region. Yet, the multiplicity of Middle Stone Age lithic technologies testifies to significant behavioural and demographic dynamics, marked by innovation and adaptability. Here, we present the first in-depth analy...

Rose Cottage Cave is widely recognised as a key sequence for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in the southern African central interior, with its unique palaeoenvironmental and chrono-cultural archive spanning a semi-continuous record from the Late Pleistocene to the 19th century. Building on important previous research, new excavations will...

A new granite-doped concrete block with 60 cm x 60 cm x 60 cm dimensions has been built at CENIEH, Burgos, Spain, for dosimetry calibration and cross-referencing purposes. Independent evaluations of the block’s gamma dose rate using passive Al2O3:C dosimeters and various field gamma spectrometer (NaI) probes produce consistent results of 1495 ± 51...

Rose Cottage Cave is widely recognised as a key sequence for the Middle Stone Age and Later Stone Age in the southern African central interior, with its unique palaeoenvironmental and chrono-cultural archive spanning a semi-continuous record from the Late Pleistocene to the 19th century. Building on important previous research, new excavations will...

We present a series of 12 OSL/IRSL dates that revise and complete the chronology of the important Middle (MSA) and Later Stone Age (LSA) site Umbeli Belli in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. These dates shift the previous radiometric ages thousands of years older than earlier measurements and play a key role in revising the cultural stratigraphy of Kwa...

The understanding of cultural dynamics at work at the end of the Final Pleistocene in West Africa suffers from a significant lack of excavated and dated sites, particularly in the Sahelian and Sudanian ecozones. While the Later Stone Age shows varied behavioral developments in different parts of the continent, the chrono-cultural framework of this...

Le stade isotopique 2 (29,000-11,700 BP) est la phase climatique aride et instable qui précède la mise en place de l'Holocène. Dans plusieurs régions d'Afrique, cette phase est marquée par un hiatus sédimentaire et/ou occupationnel, en particulier pendant le Dernier Maximum Glaciaire (26,500-19,000 BP). L'extrême aridité qui caractérise cette pério...

Goda Buticha is located some 30 km west of the Dire Dawa city in eastern Ethiopia and is one of the rare stratified archaeological sites in the Horn of Africa that documents Late Pleistocene human occupation from at least c. 63 ka. To date, c. 5 m3 of sediments have been excavated from a surface of 2 m2 at the entrance of the cave. The Goda Buticha...

Once it was realized in the 1970s that the Middle Stone Age (MSA) chronologically extended beyond the limits of radiocarbon dating (Vogel & Beaumont, 1972), the increased interest for this period was somewhat disturbed by the increased difficulty to obtain reliable ages. Among the relevant dating methods, luminescence dating has played a major role...

The Pleistocene to Holocene sedimentary sequence of the Falémé Valley, eastern Senegal, is one of the rare contexts in West Africa documenting the Paleolithic. Here, the Middle Stone Age (MSA) to Later Stone Age (LSA) transition seems to occur between the end of MIS 3 and the beginning of the Holocene, a period during which several successive techn...

The Modder River basin has been the focus of extensive surveys followed by targeted excavations of specific erosional gullies (known locally as dongas), where Middle and Later Stone Age artefacts and fossils are abundant. At Damvlei, a donga located on the left bank of the Modder, lithic artefacts and fossils were observed in the 1990s. Here, we pr...

Border Cave hosts a rare Middle and Early Later Stone Age sequence of deposits that extends as far back as ca. 250 thousand years (ka). The site's chronology has been built mainly on Electron Spin Resonance (ESR) ages obtained from teeth, conducted at the end of the 1990s, and on radiocarbon dating for the more recent layers. In order to refine the...

La mission archéologique menée en 2021 dans le cadre du projet « Peuplement humain et paléoenvironnement en Afrique – Projet Falémé » a eu lieu entre le 7 décembre 2020 et le 10 avril 2021 au Sénégal oriental, dans la vallée de la Falémé, après une phase de préparation administrative et logistique à Bamako au Mali. Elle s’est terminée à Dakar par d...

In 2015, which marked 35 years since Beaumont had worked at the site, we renewed excavations at Border Cave. Our primary aims were to reassess the stratigraphic context of the sedimentary and cultural sequence, gain insight into site formation processes, make a detailed study of organic remains, identify long term cultural trends, and characterize...

In nature, each mineral grain (quartz or feldspar) receives a dose rate (Dr) specific to its environment. The dose-rate distribution therefore reflects the micro-dosimetric context of grains of similar size. If all the grains were well bleached at deposition, this distribution is assumed to correspond, within uncertainties, with the distribution of...

Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5 and 4 are periods of major cultural innovations in the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of southern Africa. While extensive data is available for the coast, far less is known about the interior, in particular its central plateau. This is likely due to the large geographic extent of this area and a general paucity of caves and roc...

To overcome the problems associated with the traditional U-series dating protocol (large amount of sample required, possible contamination during preparation and consideration of sample contamination in the past), we present a new approach using isotope mapping of radioelements produced by femtosecond laser ablation coupled with high resolution mas...

Over the past decade, the increasing wealth of new archaeological data on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) in Senegal and Mali has broadened our understanding of West Africa's contributions to cultural developments. Within the West African sequence, the phase of Marine Isotope Stage 3 (MIS 3, ca. 59-24 ka) yielded so far the best known and extensive arch...

Teeth are usually targeted for dating archaeological sites because they are the least prone to dissolution, in comparison with bones. However, despite this apparent resistance, teeth do undergo diagenesis, which needs to be accounted for in order to obtain accurate ages. In particular, the uptake of trace elements such as uranium in dental tissues...

Coastal adaptations have been considered to play an important role in the bio-cultural evolution of early Homo sapiens and their dispersal out of Africa. In line with this assessment, recent years have seen increasing evidence for the exploitation of seafood from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of northern and southern Africa. Yet, chronological control...

In nature, any mineral grain (quartz or feldspar) receives a dose-rate (Dr) specific to its environment. The dose-rate distributions, therefore, reflect the micro-dosimetric context of grains of similar size. If all the grains have been well bleached at deposition, this distribution corresponds, within uncertainties, to the distribution of equivale...

In southern Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. The Middle Stone Age sequence from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, on the West Coast of the...

La mission de terrain 2020 dans la Vallée de la Falémé, Sénégal oriental, avait pour objectif de documenter plus précisément les dynamiques d’occupation les plus anciennes, de l’Acheuléen au Middle Stone Age ; de mettre en évidence le passage, encore mal compris, des derniers chasseurs-cueilleurs aux sociétés productrices ; de préciser la variabili...

The dose rate of the 90Sr / 90Y beta source used in most luminescence readers is a laboratory key parameter. There is a well-established body of knowledge about parameters controlling accuracy and precision of the calibration value but some hard-to-explain inconsistencies still exist. Here, we have investigated the impact of grain size, aliquot siz...

The Ravin Blanc I archaeological occurrence, dated to MIS 5, provides unprecedented data on the Middle Stone Age (MSA) of West Africa since well-contextualized archaeological sites pre-dating MIS 4/3 are extremely rare for this region. The combined approach on geomorphology, phytolith analysis, and OSL date estimations offers a solid framework for...

Published table 1, in table format for more clarity. From: Douze et al. 2021. A West African Middle Stone Age site dated to the beginning of MIS 5: Archaeology, chronology, and paleoenvironment of the Ravin Blanc I (eastern Senegal). Journal of Human Evolution, 154, 102952.

During the summer of 2020 the excavation team at Hohle Fels Cave in the Ach Valley of southwestern Germany recovered a leaf point (in German Blattspitze) made from gray Jurassic chert. The find is well-preserved and remarkable for a number of reasons. First this is the only leaf point recovered by a modern excavation in the Swabian Jura, and is the...

In southern Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. The Middle Stone Age sequence from Diepkloof Rock Shelter, on the West Coast of the...

The end of the Palaeolithic represents one of the least-known periods in the history of western Africa, both in terms of its chronology and the identification of cultural assemblages entities based on the typo-technical analyses of its industries. In this context, the site of Fatandi V offers new data to discuss the cultural pattern during the Late...

The dose rate of the 90Sr / 90Y beta source used in most luminescence readers is a laboratory key parameter. There is a well-established body of knowledge about parameters controlling accuracy and precision of the calibration value but some hard to explain inconsistencies still exist. Here we have investigated the impact of grain size, aliquot size...

In situ gamma spectrometry is a useful technique used by the Luminescence and ESR dating community to improve the representativity of dose rate measurements in the context of gamma dose rate heterogeneities around dated material. This paper presents `gamma', a new R package and its graphical user interface `gammaShiny', allowing a reliable and repr...

In South Africa, key technologies and symbolic behaviors develop as early as the later Middle Stone Age in MIS5. These innovations arise independently in various places, contexts and forms, until their full expression during the Still Bay and the Howiesons Poort. We elaborate here on the Middle Stone Age sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelter (South Af...

We present additional experiments for alpha-Al2O3:C chips used to estimate in situ g-dose rates. Our contribution supplements the article by Kreutzer et al. (2018) and presents results from previously announced follow-up experiments. (1) We investigate the divergent g-dose rate results we obtained from cross-check experiments for one reference site...

Les études menées le long de la Falémé, affluent du Sénégal, dans le secteur Sansandé-Missira, permettent de se faire une idée assez précise de la stratigraphie des formations sédimentaires qui se dévoilent à la faveur de l'incision récente du cours d'eau. Les datations par le radiocarbone et par luminescence optiquement stimulée calent l'essentiel...

Les études menées le long de la Falémé, affluent du Sénégal, dans le secteur Sansandé-Missira, permettent de se faire une idée assez précise de la stratigraphie des formations sédimentaires qui se dévoilent à la faveur de l’incision récente du cours d’eau. Les datations OSL calent l’essentiel de ces dépôts du dernier cycle climatique, avec une très...

La vallée de la Falémé (Sénégal Oriental) fait l'objet de recherches paléoenvironnementales et archéologiques depuis 2012. Le potentiel des archives sédimentaires concernant l'étude des trois derniers millénaires est maintnenat avéré, particulièrement dans les ravins latéraux de la vallée principale. Le style méandriforme de la Falémé offre de larg...

Dans le cadre du projet Peuplement humain et paléoenvironnement en Afrique, coordonné par l’un des auteurs (É.H.) et financé par le Fonds National Suisse de la recherche scientifique (FNS), la Fondation Suisse-Liechtenstein pour les Recherches Archéologiques à l’Étranger (SLSA), l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche française (ANR) et la Faculté des S...

The calibration of any artificial-source attached to a luminescence reader is fundamental for the accuracy of luminescence dating results. Here, we present calibration results obtained for a-source attached to a single grain Risø reader in Bordeaux using a series of quartz of different origins. The quartz was irradiated with three different-irradia...

Burnt lithics made of macro‐ or microcrystal aggregates, like quartzite, silcrete, vein quartz, chalcedony, flint, and cherts, are usually dated by luminescence methods. Most of the time, the dated event is the last heating in a prehistoric hearth (although lava flows and natural fires may induce sufficient warming as well) and the covered period r...

The aim of this paper is to present the preliminary results of the study of a Recent Holocene sedimentary sequence located in the Falémé valley in Eastern Senegal (West Africa). Geomorphological prospections and archeological excavations are performed in this area since 2011. So far the research allowed an understanding of the valley geometry and t...

In the past few decades, a diverse array of research has emphasized the precocity of technically advanced and symbolic practices occurring during the southern African Middle Stone Age. However, uncertainties regarding the regional chrono-cultural framework constrain models and identification of the cultural and ecological mechanisms triggering the...

Bifacial points are widespread tools over the northern half of the African continent during the Middle Stone Age. They are common components in the lithic industries, but are not often the subject of a specific interdisciplinary study associating functional technology, typology and traceology, and environmental contextualization. Such comprehensive...

Umbeli Belli is a quartzite rock shelter located in the Mpambanyoni river valley in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Building on earlier work by Cable in 1979 we excavated the site in three seasons between 2016 and 2018 and recovered important archaeological data on the later part of the Middle Stone Age [MSA] and the Later Stone Age [LSA]. New OSL dat...

Le présent rapport de la campagne 2017 au Sénégal oriental, menée dans le cadre du programme international « Peuplement humain et paléoenvironnement en Afrique », intègre les résultats de deux projets complémentaires : le projet ANR-FNS CheRCHA, ainsi que le projet FNS Falémé. Le premier vise à reconstituer le cadre chronostratigraphique et les évo...

For more than a century, Senegal has yielded abundant Palaeolithic finds, in particular on the Atlantic coast as well as in the Fal�em�e Valley, but the lack of reliable and integrated chrono-cultural data has limited the possibilities of interpretation. These gaps were one of the main factors leading to the launch of a new research programme in th...

Les recherches menées dans la vallée de la Falémé (Sénégal Oriental) ont déjà livré des données paléoenvironnementales couvrant le Pléistocène supérieur, permettant une première comparaison avec les données et résultats issus des recherches menées en zone sahélienne, dans la vallée du Yamé (Pays Dogon, Mali). La poursuite de ces recherches et la mu...

In Paleolithic settlement models for Africa, West Africa has been neglected, if not entirely ignored, due to an obvious lack of research in the region but also of the availability of reliable and precise chronostratigraphic data. However, since 1997 research conducted at Ounjougou (Mali) has significantly updated our view of the West African Middle...

In situ dosimetry (active, passive dosimeters) provides high accuracy by determining environmental dose rates directly in the field. Passive dosimeters, such as α-Al2O3:C, are of particular interest for sites with desired minimum disturbance (e.g., archaeological sites). Here, we present a comprehensive approach obtaining the environmental cosmic a...

Cette 19ème année de recherches du programme « Peuplement humain et paléo-environnement en Afrique » constitue la première année du projet ANR-FNS CHeRCHA (Chronology of Rapid Climatic changes and Human adaptation in West Africa) et du projet FNS centré sur les dynamiques techniques des deux derniers millénaires dans la vallée de la Falémé. Cette m...

Luminescence ages are calculated by dividing an absorbed dose by the dose rate to which the natural dosimeter has been exposed. In practice, one measures an equivalent dose, De; in the absence of an alpha dose contribution, this should be indistinguishable from the dose absorbed in nature. Here we first review the relationship between absorbed dose...

Depuis 2011, le programme de recherche international Peuplement Humain et Paléoenvironnement en Afrique (dir. Pr. É. Huysecom) concentre une partie de ses recherches sur la Vallée de la Falémé, à l’est du Sénégal. Plusieurs séries de vestiges provenant d’industries associées à l’Early, au Middle et au Later Stone Age y ont en effet été identifiées....

Goda Buticha is a cave site near Dire Dawa in southeastern Ethiopia that contains an archaeological sequence sampling the late Pleistocene and Holocene of the region. The sedimentary sequence displays complex cultural, chronological and sedimentological histories that seem incongruent with one another. A first set of radiocarbon ages suggested a lo...

A function named textitanalyse_baSAR() was written using the statistical programming language textbfR and its code is now available within thetextbfR package 'Luminescence'. The function allows the application of the Bayesian hierarchical model 'baSAR' proposed by Combés et al. (2015) and comes with additional features to analyse luminescence data...

Elands Bay Cave (EBC) is one of the key sites for the analysis of the Late Pleistocene/Holocene record in southern Africa. It typifies an area of study, the West Coast of South Africa, which benefits from a long history of research, from the 1960s until today. The 2011 project of EBC was initiated within the framework of the Middle Stone Age (MSA)...

In 2011 we conducted a field campaign at the site of Elands Bay Cave (EBC), on the West coast of South Africa, with the aim of clarifying the nature and chronology of its human Pleistocene occupations. In the present paper, we present the results of a chronology based on various materials and methods: radiocarbon (C14) dating was applied to 8 fragm...

Elands Bay Cave is a small coastal rock shelter formed in quartzite that contained up to ca. 3 m of anthropogenic and geogenic deposits with archaeological materials dating to the Middle Stone Age through Later Stone Age. Today, only the lower portion of the sedimentary sequence, comprising ca. 1.2 m of sediment remains. A geoarchaeological study o...

For more than a century, Senegal has yielded abundant Palaeolithic finds, in particular on the Atlantic coast as well as in the Falémé Valley, but the lack of reliable and integrated chrono-cultural data has limited the possibilities of interpretation. These gaps were one of the main factors leading to the launch of a new research programme in the...

La vallée de la Falémé, affluent du Sénégal qui fait office sur une bonne partie de son cours de frontière avec le Mali, offre à l’analyse de nombreuses formations alluviales que les dernières missions de terrain ont permis de comprendre dans leur géométrie et de dater. Ce poster a pour objectif principal de présenter les premiers résultats issus d...

The first results of the paleoenvironmental analyses obtained in the Faleme river valley highlight the potential of this area for palaeoenvironmental investigations form the Late PLeistocene to the Holocene. The results obtained show the succession of three main phases and can be compared with the results from Ounjougou for the same period (Lespez...

Recent studies have shown that the Falémé Valley, located in eastern Senegal, is a major component in the comprehension of the West African Palaeolithic period. Several of the sites discovered in this region show a wide variety of lithic productions attributed to the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age. Optically stimulated luminescence dating of 16...

Quatre années de recherches archéologiques et géomorphologiques, de 2012 à 2015, dans la vallée de la Falémé, dans l’Est du Sénégal, ont permis de jeter les bases d’une seconde archéoséquence de référence en Afrique de l’Ouest, après celle d’Ounjougou au Mali. Différents types d’industries ont été reconnues et collectées : elles sont issues de cont...

n this study, we propose and implement a Bayesian model to estimate a central equivalent dose from a set of luminescence measurements. This model is based on assumptions similar to the ones used in the standard statistical pipeline (typically implemented in the Analyst software followed by a subsequent central equivalent dose analysis) but tackles...

In this paper, we introduce a recently initiated research project conducted at Bushman Rock Shelter, on the northeastern edge of the Highveld plateau in Limpopo Province, South Africa. Previous excavations carried out at the site during the 1960s and 1970s exposed a deep and well-stratified sequence of c. 7 metres of archaeological deposits associa...

La campagne de terrain de 2014 nous a confirmé l’extraordinaire potentiel de la vallée de la Falémé en termes d’histoire du peuplement et de variations climatiques et environnementales, et nous apporte de nombreuses données nouvelles, voire inattendues. Elle nous a aussi permis de découvrir de nombreux sites archéologiques jusqu’ici encore inconnus...

Ounjougou is the name of a large complex of archaeological sites, that were extensively studied between 1997 and 2008 by the international team of the “Human settlement and palaeoenvironment in West Africa” project. This complex is important because well stratified Palaeolithic sites in West Africa are rare, and because it covers a long period of t...

The Shi’bat Dihya 1 site in western Yemen, dated by optically stimulated luminescence to 55 ka, provides insight into the Middle Paleolithic peopling of the Arabian Peninsula. The archaeological layer is interstratified within thick, sandy silt floodplain deposits filling a piedmont basin. Luminescence dates, lack of soil development, and gypsum pr...

The recovery at Shi’bat Dihya 1 (SD1) of a dense Middle Paleolithic human occupation dated to 55 ka BP sheds new light on the role of the Arabian Peninsula at the time of the alleged expansion of modern humans out of Africa. SD1 is part of a complex of Middle Paleolithic sites cut by the Wadi Surdud and interstratified within an alluvial sedimentar...

Broken ostrich eggshells are commonly found in Middle Stone Age sites of southern Africa, presumably collected for food consumption, and later used as artefacts. At Diepkloof Rock Shelter, Middle Stone Age inhabitants used ostrich eggshells as a medium to convey abstract depictions. Since 1998, excavations at Diepkloof have recovered 408 engraved p...

The southern African MSA comprises a series of phases of unique technological innovations that fuel current models on the evolutionary processes of Anatomically Modern Humans. However, the nature and variability of these technological phases remain poorly documented. This study reports on the previously unpublished sequence of Diepkloof Rock Shelte...

Diepkloof Rock Shelter offers an exceptional opportunity to study the onset and evolution of both Still Bay (SB) and Howiesons Poort (HP) techno-complexes. However, previous age estimates based on luminescence dating of burnt quartzites (Tribolo et al., 2009) and of sediments (Jacobs et al., 2008) were not in agreement. Here, we present new lumines...

The Shi'bat Dihya 1 site in western Yemen, dated by optically stimulated luminescence to 55 ka, provides insight into the Middle Paleolithic peopling of the Arabian Peninsula. The archaeological layer is interstratified within thick, sandy silt floodplain deposits filling a piedmont basin. Luminescence dates, lack of soil development, and gypsum pr...

Les formations pléistocènes situées au pied de la « falaise » de Bandiagara (pays Dogon, Mali) n’ont jamais fait l’objet de datations précises. Cet escarpement, un « glint » développé dans les grès conglomératiques du Précambrien reposant en discordance sur le socle birrimien, constitue un obstacle majeur propice à la fois aux accumulations éolienn...